Conventional print service facilities comprise one or a plurality of printers in a single physical location, e.g. a print shop or print room, which provide to a customer a printing service for posters, brochures, leaflets, copies of photographs and the like. Typically, a print service facility may comprise one or more large format printers capable of printing to large format size media, for example a HP DeskJet printer, and may comprise one or a plurality of smaller format printers, for example HP laser jet printers for printing smaller format sizes, e.g. A4 or similar.
Such printers may print images supplied by a customer on data carrier, for example CD ROM, floppy disk or the like. It is known for a print service provider to provide direct to a customer an internet enabled driver for installation on a customers own computer which is capable of sending customer generated images from the customer's computer to a computer at the print facility. Such systems are limited to single print companies providing proprietary internet enabled drivers to their customers, for using the facilities of the print service provider only.
Mediaflex.com (http://www.mediaflex.com) offer an internet accessible printing service using a standard web browser interface. This service is of the type provided by a single print service provider directly to their customers.
Barnes and Noble provide the known ByEnlarged service, which provides a centralized printing facility in a single location. However, this solution only supports limited print sizes.
The known Mimeo service provides centralized printing, but is restricted to serving US customers only, and provides small format prints, supporting only a single paper size.
Prior art on-line print service solutions are restricted to a small number of individual print service providers offering on-line image transfer facilities to their customers.
Problems associated with known on-line printing services include transfer of content data across low bandwidth internet connections, poor reliability, unattendedness of print service provider computer devices, human error, the cost involved in running max production of ‘unique’ print articles, i.e. print on demand articles, and lack of scalability of offering print services.
A known ‘distribute and print’ technology is capable of limited job routing. The mediaflex system provides a print on-demand e-service for print service providers, but does not manage printing. The known Print Shop is a software RIP which also provides queue management and routing capabilities. Ocè provides a queue manager tool that also works as a printing tool for some file formats. However, all known approaches provide only pieces of technology, which in the main are not automated at all. Known solutions do not handle a complete printing problem, and known solutions do not handle the fulfillment problem of fulfilling a complete print order. Few known solutions handle the problem of content transmission over the internet.